Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to software tools used to improve business enterprise decision-making. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to present information; content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery and management of reports and analytics; data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources; and data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data.
There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from stored data. For instance, Business Objects Americas of San Jose, Calif., sells a number of widely used business intelligence and report generation products, including Crystal Reports™, Crystal Xcelsius™, and BusinessObjects Enterprise™. As used herein, the term report refers to information automatically retrieved (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) from a data source (e.g., a database, a data warehouse, and the like), where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information should be presented. A non-report is an electronic document that is constructed without the automatic retrieval (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) of information from a data source. Examples of non-report electronic documents include typical business application documents, such as a word processor document, a presentation document, and the like.
Dashboards provide the user with a graphical user interface that enables a user to see key data items A dashboard may be defined such that an individual can use the dashboard to track metrics associated with performance objectives. In this way, a dashboard can provide charts, gauges, traffic light visualizations and alerts that provide a quick summary of the degree to which performance goals are being met.
A report document may provide a similar interface to the underlying data as a dashboard. A report document is generally created by a specialized tool including executable instructions to access data and format it. A report document where the content does not include external data, either saved within the report or accessed live, is a template document for a report rather than a report document. Unlike other non-report documents that may optionally import external data within a document, a report document by design is primarily a medium for accessing, formatting, and presenting external data.
A report design tool contains executable instructions specifically designed to facilitate working with external data sources. In addition to instructions regarding external data source connection drivers, these instructions may include advanced filtering of data, instructions for combining data from different external data sources, instructions for updating join structures and relationships in report data, and instructions including logic to support a more complex internal data model (that may include additional constraints, relationships, and metadata).
In contrast to a spreadsheet type application, a report generation tool is generally not limited to a table structure but can support a range of structures. A report design tool is designed primarily to support imported external data, whereas a spreadsheet application equally facilitates manually entered data and imported data. In both cases, a spreadsheet application applies a spatial logic that is based on the table cell layout within the spreadsheet in order to interpret data and perform calculations on the data. In contrast, a report design tool is not limited to logic that is based on the display of the data, but rather can interpret the data and perform calculations based on the original (or a redefined) data structure and meaning of the imported data. Spreadsheet applications work within a looping calculation model, whereas report generation tools may support a range of calculation models. Although there may be an overlap in the function of a spreadsheet document and a report document, the applications used to generate these documents contain instructions with different assumptions concerning the existence of an external data source and different logical approaches to interpreting and manipulating imported data.
The present invention relates to the analytical, performance management, and reporting aspects of BI. Performance metrics have become increasingly valuable and complex as they address requirements to analyze and measure the achievements of an individual, business unit, corporation, industry and the like. It is common for companies to set targets based on a performance trend where they wish to achieve the target or to achieve a target value point further on the same trend continuum as the target value. For example, a company may have a sales target result of 10 million where achieving that goal is 100% success and following the trend of maximizing achieving a result of 12 million is 120% success. Similarly there may be a cost target result of 10 million where achieving that cost target is 100% success and following the trend of minimizing a result of 8 million is 120% success. However, there are also many business cases where a target result is an absolute target rather than a target with a maximizing or minimizing trend. Maintaining headcount on a project or a stock level in a warehouse are common examples where there are disadvantages associated with not hitting the target in the case where the actual value is either greater or lesser than the absolute target value. Absolute targets also pose a challenge when they are included in aggregate measures and are combined with other measures with maximizing or minimizing success percentages.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a mechanism for measuring center values as percentage achievements. In particular, it would be desirable to provide a method to measure center values as percentage achievements such that they support asymmetrical boundary conditions and such that center values can be aggregated into other percentage calculations for achievement.